Propagation during last weekend’s broadcast Saturday at 1600-1630 UTC on 17860 kHz was probably the worst in the history of VOA Radiogram. The signal was generally unusable in Europe, and poor in most of North America. However, Loet in Curaçao had very good reception on 17860, and he decoded this image…

I also had excellent reception using a receiver in Nova Scotia.

Let’s hope for better conditions this weekend. The program will include an experiment with Russian text. The Cyrillic characters transmit at much slower speed than Latin characters: about 33 words per minute in MFSK32, and 70 wpm in MFSK64. We will try MFSK64 for the additional speed, but will this faster mode survive trans-Atlantic propagation?

For the correct display of the Russian characters, be sure to select the UTF-8 character set via Fldigi’s Configure > Colors & Fonts  

Here is the lineup for VOA Radiogram, program 107, 18-19 April 2015, all in MFSK32 except where noted:

  1:23  Program preview
  2:29  India’s net neutrality debate*
  7:76  US Congressional hearing on Russian international media
22:46  MFSK64: VOA Russian story about Yuri Gagarin*
26:53  MFSK32: Closing announcements*

* with image

Please send reception reports to radiogram@voanews.com.

VOA Radiogram transmission schedule

(all days and times UTC):

Sat 0930-1000 5745 kHz

Sat 1600-1630 17860 kHz

Sun 0230-0300 5745 kHz

Sun 1930-2000 15670 kHz

All via the Edward R. Murrow transmitting station in North Carolina.

The Mighty KBC will transmit a minute of  MFSK64 Sunday at 0130 UTC (Saturday 9:30 pm EDT) on 7375 kHz, via Germany. This weekend’s image: Dutch tulips. Reports to Eric: themightykbc@gmail.com .

WRMI, Radio Miami International, will transmit digital IDs this weekend, same schedule …

You might be able to decode the text even if you can’t hear the WRMI voice broadcast.  

AndFlmsg. If you have an Android phone or tablet, please try to decode VOA Radiogram using the beta AndFlmsg app, B0.5.0, which can be downloaded from http://www.w1hkj.com/vk2eta/ . This new version can decode MFSK images as well as text. AndFlmsg does not yet have the UTF-8 character set, so the Russian will not display.